Speed Is Everything Today, And You Should Expect Your Digital Marketing Agency To Fly
Timing is everything in business, and today it’s more important than ever. Companies can’t wait (nor should they wait) six months to start to see work and results.
As business starts to return, CEOs and sales leaders are trying to catch up for the losses associated with the last few months. Your digital marketing agency should be able to help you catch up.
For years, agencies have been telling their clients to be patient. They’ve been telling clients and prospects that it takes six months or more before they should expect to see any sign of life from their inbound marketing program.
And that is accurate. Inbound marketing, content marketing, website optimization and email campaigns do take time.
But today, lead generation, the creation of sales opportunity, closing new customers and optimizing revenue in your current customer base is not about one single set of tactics.
Today, you need a collection of proactive demand generation and reactive inbound marketing tactics orchestrated on a platform of strategic messaging wrapped with the necessary analytics and technology to produce results in weeks, not months or years.
Today, you should expect your digital marketing agency to produce a significant amount of work in weeks, not months.
Here’s what you should expect from your agency.
To see what is possible, we’re going to show you two real engagements with real clients. Here are two 14-day Accelerated Engagements.
DINTEC, an SAP implementation consulting firm.
During their two-week Accelerated Engagement, we created the following program elements for them:
To see exactly what we did for DINTEC in their 14-day Accelerated Engagement, click here to view an infographic we share with all our clients at the end of their engagement.
Tx3, a software and consulting services firm specializing in regulatory compliance.
During their two-week Accelerated Engagement, we created the following program elements for them:
Here are two 30-day Accelerated Engagements from two other clients.
MooreCo, a manufacturer of furniture for universities, libraries and schools.
During their 30-day Accelerated Engagement, we created the following program elements for them:
To see exactly what we did for MooreCo in their 30-day Accelerated Engagement, click here to view an infographic we share with all our clients at the end of their engagement.
Peerless, a cyber security firm specializing in the government space. This company came to us with the intent to launch a new service offering related to upcoming guidelines and compliance requirements when working with the U.S. government.
During their 30-day Accelerated Engagement, we created the following program elements for them:
To see exactly what we did for Peerless in their 30-day Accelerated Engagement, click here to view an infographic we share with all our clients at the end of their engagement.
You can see by the illustrations above that a lot of strategy work is done. A lot of foundational marketing assets are created, like content, website pages, nurtures and videos. Campaign assets are developed. Sales enablement upgrades are installed. A lot of technical setup, configuration and optimization work is done.
The next question should be: “When does all of this produce results?”
The answer is immediately.
Consider this situation: If you already have 5,000 people visiting your website and no conversions, no leads and no sales opportunities, then making all of the necessary changes to your website in 30 days means on the 31st day you should be seeing metrics that point to roughly 50 MQLs (marketing-qualified leads), 10 SQLs (sales-qualified leads) and five to seven new sales opportunities in the second month.
That means if you close even 50% of these sales opportunities and each is worth even $10,000, you could realize $30,000 in incremental revenue during that month. Annualize this out over time, forgetting about the incremental improvements, and now you’re looking at over $300,000 in new revenue.
No waiting and no need to be patient — just new revenue growth for the company.
With all respect to my fellow agency owners, it’s not that they don’t want to produce results like this. But most agencies are not set up to deliver these kinds of results.
To help you understand this in more detail, it makes sense to look at how most agencies are set up.
Let’s look back in time 15 years ago, when agencies primarily did projects for clients. They found a new client and did project work for them, like building a new website, creating new content offers or helping them by designing a new brochure or logo.
Some agencies had ongoing relationships with their clients for SEO work, paid advertising or public relations. These retainer-based engagements were not typical in most marketing agencies.
It wasn’t until 2008 or so that agencies started looking at clients more strategically and started offering long-term retainer engagements that covered a wider variety of tactics.
This served the agencies very well. It flattened out their cash flow, spread client payments out over months, positioned them as trusted advisors to clients and allowed some agencies to grow quickly.
This didn’t serve the clients so well. It did help clients manage budgets, but it also forced the agencies to meter out the work, spreading it out over months. This delayed the results, as you’d imagine.
What this also did was force agencies to assign multiple clients to a single account manager or consultant. This worked for the agency but didn’t necessarily work for the clients. Consultants at some agencies handle 10 or more clients. The less clients pay, the more clients a single consultant handles.
You should keep that in mind as you search for digital agencies. If you’re getting a proposal that includes a low monthly retainer, you should expect to be assigned an account manager that has a large set of clients to oversee.
This is very typical at SEO agencies or agencies that specialize in paid advertising. They might offer very low monthly retainers; some are around $500 a month. This sounds great to the client, but the account manager is assigned more than 100 accounts.
You can be sure that the less you pay, the less attention you’ll get. The less you pay, the less experienced your team. This is the math that drives agency profitability. Some clients are OK with this and it works well. I’m not judging; just pointing out the economics of running an agency.
There’s nothing technically wrong with this setup. Giving a lot of clients to account managers is very common. Many professional services firms work like this and have since the beginning of time.
However, it is highly inefficient. Having a portfolio of clients means you have to hop around all day working on different businesses, in different industries and with different people. This stopping and starting is highly wasteful.
If you think you’re a good multitasker and your agency consultant can be too, guess again. Here are two articles that show the research behind the myth associated with multitasking:
https://hbr.org/2010/05/how-and-why-to-stop-multitaski
The real challenge for clients and multi-client configurations at agencies is you (the client) are paying for the inefficiencies.
When you look at this closer, you see that the large enterprise-level consulting companies like Deloitte, KPMG and Bain don’t work with clients like this. They deploy a team of people who work only with one client at a time.
This is the correct way to impact results quickly, and it is the most efficient way to work with your digital marketing agency, too.
If you want results, if you want work quickly and if you want to see the impact of new marketing, sales and customer service improvements in weeks instead of months, you should be looking for an agency that can deliver a dedicated team working only on your business for at least two weeks but for as long as eight weeks.
This includes the writers, designers, developers and consultants assigned to your business. They all should be only working on your company. This is how you should want to work with agencies in the future.